The background description provided herein is for the purpose of generally presenting the context of the disclosure. Work of the presently named inventors, to the extent the work is described in this background section, as well as aspects of the description that may not otherwise qualify as prior art at the time of filing, are neither expressly nor impliedly admitted as prior art against the present disclosure.
A codec (coder-encoder) encodes a data stream or signal for transmission, storage, or encryption, and decodes the data for applications such as playback, editing or the like. A standardized 64b/66b codec as defined by the IEEE 802.3 group transforms a 64 bit data into a 66 bit codeword. The standard permits only a specific combination of data and control characters to be included in the codeword. Further, the standard imposes certain restrictions as to the location of a start control character within the codeword. Such restrictions tend to underutilize the payload bandwidth, thereby resulting in lower data transmission throughput. Data transmission in a fully flexible 64b/66b codec is increased by allowing any combination of data and control characters. However, the codeword structure of such a codec is significantly different than the codeword structure as defined by the IEEE standard, and is thus not compatible with the standard 100G Ethernet forward error correction schemes.